Disqus Expands Sponsored Comments Globally With Xaxis Partnership

Disqus Sponsored Comments are rolling out globally in a partnership with Xaxis.

Disqus, the comment management system, launched Sponsored Comments in April. Brands can target Sponsored Comments, which appear at the top of discussion threads, based on both the content of an article and the comments. Disqus has announced it is expanding Sponsored Comments globally with programmatic buying capabilities.

The program expansion is driven by a partnership with Xaxis, the programmatic buying division of WPP. Xaxis clients will be able to buy Sponsored Comments on sites running Disqus programmatically.

Sponsored Comments aren’t integrated into the reader comments about an article, but the ad targeting is driven by what users are talking about. Here’s how the company explains its targeting in a blog post:

So we’re applying semantic, keyword targeting at the discussion level with this product. We target against what the article or blog post is about, what the discussion includes – because sometimes the discussion forks into new topics – and what we know about that specific user as they visit various websites, many of which use Disqus (we are on over 3 million websites). That’s a unique targeting capability because we’re the only company with such a large footprint in comments.

Disqus says advertisers are able to target against more than 1,000 discussion topics and that new topics can be created for “specific brand needs or as new trends develop”.

Brands can manage the replies made to their Sponsored Comments, which appear on a separate landing page —  a feature the company points out is not available from Facebook or Twitter. Going a step further, Disqus says, “What we’re able to do is to continually scan sites and comments for over 2,500 words and expressions for brand safety scoring by using the same technology we built for spam and profanity detection.”